Reason had failed — the trenches proved it. From that conviction, Andre Breton launched Surrealism in Paris in 1924, arguing that truth lay in what reason suppressed: dreams, desire, accident. Drawing on Dada and Freud, writers practiced automatic writing while painters split between Dali and Magritte's hyper-real dream-imagery and the abstract automatism of Miro. Breton ran the movement with authoritarian control, expelling dissenters and treating women artists as muses rather than makers. Its devices — melting clocks, uncanny juxtaposition — now saturate advertising and film: a victory that is also a kind of capture.
In 1924 a young French poet declared war on the rule of rational control over art and life. Andre Breton had worked in wartime medical and psychiatric wards in the First World War, listening to shell-shocked soldiers describe their dreams, and he came to believe that the orderly, rational mind had led civilization straight into the trenches. So he proposed the opposite cure. If reason had failed, then truth must lie in everything reason suppressed: dreams, desire, madness, and pure chance. His Surrealist Manifesto called for artists to switch off conscious control and let the unconscious speak. From that call came the strangest images of the century: a clock melting over a branch, a train steaming from a fireplace, a man in a bowler hat raining from the sky. Surrealism set out to fuse dream and waking life into a higher reality, and it never fully let go of its first ambition, to change not just art but the world.